This invention relates to weapons designed to dispense a plurality of projectiles. The system particularly pertains to dispensers that attempt to achieve a predictable pattern in both size and uniformity at a target location.
Weapons incorporating projectile dispensers have existed for decades. In general, the goal of these dispensers has been to release a plurality of projectiles such that they strike a target a short period of time later at some increased pattern size than their original packing in the weapon. However, there have been a number of problems associated with these weapons.
The first problem is packing density. The density of the projectile packing in the weapon was often very inefficient because the projectiles often had fins to aid in keeping the projectile stable from time of release to impact with the target. True tangential packing of cylindrical shaped projectiles yields maximum density, but dispensers of the past have not achieved this.
The second problem is collisions between projectiles and other projectiles or collisions between projectiles and the dispenser. Flechette dispensers of the past often had to pack nose to tail in order to increase packing density. With half of the projectiles needing to flip 180 degrees and damp out, many collisions occurred as well as problems with projectiles never damping out before striking the target. Packing density also pushed many dispensers to put rows of projectiles right behind one another. Aerodynamic drafting caused aft rows to catch up to and collide with rows in front of them.
The third problem is unreliable angles of attack upon release. Most spinning dispensers utilized sabots or other means to release projectiles as they emerged from the tube. There is little control over each individual projectile's angle of attack at release in these designs. Also, multi-row dispensers generally were ejected and released by one or two events with no control over each individual row's ejections or each row's release timing.
The fourth problem was the predictability and uniformity of the pattern of projectiles at the target. Often times in prior art dispensers the actual pattern diameter, length and width, or other pattern size was not predictable. Furthermore, the actual uniformity of the individual projectiles within the pattern was not well known in advance. Voids in the pattern, stray projectiles, and bunching in the patterns were common. These problems arose from a number of causes. First, the dispense start event and duration was generally not programmable or flexible enough to allow a pattern of a specific size to be generated at the target. Second, the packaging of the darts was in a random state within the tube before dispense, so the pattern was random after being expanded to the target. Third, the collisions and angle of attack disturbances at release caused the projectiles to fly to an unpredictable location on the target. Lastly, multi-row dispensers were generally forced to release all at once or aft to forward. Both cases result in the forwardmost row having the least amount of time to expand before striking the target. In the same group, the aft row released first or simultaneously with the front row had more time to expand before hitting the same target. This caused the pattern to be dense in the center and more and more sparse at the periphery of the pattern.